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Why the moviegoing experience is not as advertised: Macfarlane

Our enthusiasm for a movie diminishes with each inane ad that precedes it on the big screen.

By David MacfarlaneEntertainment Columnist

Wed., Nov. 21, 2012

I am writing a column about the ads that precede movies. My specific point of reference is the Varsity Cinemas and the (oh, I don’t know) three or four thousand commercials that precede the new James Bond film.

After a while they began to feel more like a geological age than a mere waste of time. But this could be a column about any of Toronto’s big movie theatres. And any of the big holiday blockbusters.

And anyway, I wish I wasn’t writing it. I’d prefer to be shouting. In an ideal world, I’d be standing on my seat, turned around to scream at the projection booth — along with everyone else trapped inside the marathon of corporate larceny that is called a multiplex — “Have you no shame? Have you no respect at all for your customers?”

But the problem is that nobody would hear us. The ads are too loud. Besides, none of the executives who make the decisions about how many commercials moviegoers can stand before they start gnawing their own legs off in order to escape are not customarily in the projection booth on a late Sunday afternoon.

They’re probably watching movies on the giant home entertainment units they can afford because they make so much money driving their captive audiences mad with idiotic ads.

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It’s notoriously hard to get hold of a movie executive when you are actually in a movie theatre. They’re busy people. They’ve got better things to do than let life pass them by while they are forced to watch commercials for cars you can drive really fast on roads in completely empty deserts.

But you never know. Maybe someone in the audience got their cell number while spending a weekend in the fourth circle of hell. That’s the one Dante reserved for the damnably greedy.

Long before anyone thought of showing commercials to people who had already spent $13 a ticket to see a movie, the great Italian poet had come up with the idea of boiling the exemplars of the third deadly sin in pots of molten gold. Forever. Which seems apropos. Since that’s almost as long as the ads go on. And bloody on.

“Oh, the new James Bond movie?” No doubt the executives would feign surprise at our impatience. “We’re getting to that. In a while.”

So, why are ads in movie theatres so effective? Well, you got me. I sat through a Götterdämmerung of them the other day while waiting for Skyfall to start, and I couldn’t tell you what a single one of them was for — assuming, of course, that torture was not their primary intent. But I can tell you why the companies that get away with showing them, ad infinitum, are so smugly confident they can.

And it’s not only because audiences feel silly hurling profanities at movie screens. It’s because the people who devote their talent and hard work to making a movie as entertaining as Skyfall are very seldom in a movie theatre on a Sunday afternoon in Toronto.

They are not present to witness the transition of cheerful, anticipation-filled moviegoers into a crowd of angry peasants in search of pitchforks. They may not fully understand that for sold-out show after sold-out show Skyfall has to overcome irritation: the irritation of an audience that feels disrespected and taken advantage of before a single motorcycle jumps a single eavestrough on the rooftops of Istanbul.

There are more important things to protest, I know. Still, we might as well. Why not boo, or clap, or whistle, or hiss, or sing protest songs while waiting for the show to start? The executives won’t hear us. But it’s not as if there’s anything much better to do.

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